Grand Theft Auto: Calibrating Laboratory Conditions to the New Normal in Union Elections

Abstract

In the twenty-first century, unions need to organize workplaces in traditionally anti-union battlegrounds to survive. But as the United Auto Workers' momentous defeats in recent years at foreign manufacturers located in the Deep South have shown, this mission becomes virtually impossible when anti-union forces — here, everything from business groups to private interests to conservative elected officials — may unite and campaign at will against a union's organizing efforts. This Article argues that the National Labor Relations Board should expand its laboratory conditions doctrine to encompass anti-union community pressure as coercive activity worthy of overturning NLRB election results. Otherwise, large-scale corporations like Nissan are free to continue recruiting regional and national anti-union forces to flout the untainted experiment that industrial democracy requires to measure employees' freedom of choice.